Deconstructing information structure

Kratzer, Angelika; Selkirk, Elisabeth

doi:10.5334/gjgl.968

Cited by 22 publications

(26 citation statements)

References 125 publications

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“…This finding is in line with recent analyses of information focus. Outside the Romance languages, and on the basis of evidence from the syntax-phonology interface, Kratzer & Selkirk (2020) argue that in Standard British and American English information focus remains unmarked. The apparent prosodic effects associated with material that is merely new (i.e.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The greater the contrast, the greater the potential: On the effects of focus in syntax

Cruschina

2021

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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The most debated syntactic reflex that is typically associated with contrast is the movement of a contrastive constituent to a dedicated, left-peripheral position. For Italian and Spanish, it has been claimed that focus fronting (FF) must be sanctioned by a contrastive interpretation of the focus, while non-contrastive focus generally occurs postverbally (see, e.g., Rizzi 1997;Zubizarreta 1998;Belletti 2004;López 2009). Only sentences with a postverbal focus are thus judged as pragmatically felicitous answers to the corresponding wh-questions. Some scholars, however, have recently reported different views and data, showing that non-contrastive preverbal foci are indeed accepted by native speakers in answers to wh-questions. In this paper, I argue that a solution to this problem can be found if the binary distinction between contrastive and non-contrastive focus is abandoned, and different 'degrees' or 'types' of contrastive focus are identified, depending on the way the set of alternatives is pragmatically exploited (Krifka 2007;Cruschina 2012). I show that languages are syntactically sensitive to specific types of focus with which special operations (e.g. FF) associate. Following Bianchi, Bocci & Cruschina (2015;, I then argue that FF is in fact triggered not by contrast per se, but by the conventional implicature that is associated with a specific type of focus.

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The greater the contrast, the greater the potential: On the effects of focus in syntax

Cruschina

2021

Glossa: A Journal of General Linguistics

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“…12 The term 'focus' has been used in the literature to cover both 'new information focus' and 'contrastive focus'. We will follow Kratzer and Selkirk (2018) and others in assuming that at least in the Germanic and Slavic languages, new information focus does not have distinctive phonological effects. Only contrastive focus does (and givenness).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 97%

“…From now on then, 'focus' will stand for 'contrastive focus'. Note that by 'new information focus ' Kratzer and Selkirk (2018) mean broad focus in the sense of Hanssen, Peters, and Gussenhoven (2008), who show that narrow focus as typical of an answer to a wh-question behaves in the same way as contrastive focus. This ties in nicely with the view of question words as intrinsically carrying contrastive focus that we will defend below.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…https://doi.org/10.1162/ling_a_00441 B's response, Tom married Sam, contrasts with A's initial statement, Tom married Kim, and this contrast is signalled by the focal stress on Sam. Many theories of contrastive focus (from Rooth 1992 toBüring 2016 andKratzer andSelkirk 2018) essentially hold that in order to mark some constituent E as contrasting with another constituent E , a speaker places focus on sub-constituents of E in such a way that the focus semantic value of E has the ordinary semantic value of E as one of its elements. This is exactly what happens in (61), because the focus semantic value of B's…”

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confidence: 99%

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Quexistentials and Focus

Hengeveld

Iatridou²,

Roelofsen

2023

Linguistic Inquiry

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Many languages have words which can be interpreted either as question words or as existentials. We call such words 'quexistentials'. An example is the Dutch word wat, which can mean either what or something. Other languages that have quexistentials include Russian, Mandarin, Korean, Vietnamese, German, and Passamaquoddy. It has been observed in the literature that focus plays an important role in the interpretation of quexistentials. More specifically, it has been claimed that across languages, quexistentials are (i) always focused on their interrogative interpretation, and (ii) never focused on their existential interpretation (see Haida 2007 pages 47, 51, 169, 182, and the many further references given there). We refer to this as the quexistential-focus biconditional: a quexistential is interpreted as a question word if and only if it is focused. The contribution of the paper is twofold. On the one hand, we offer a possible explanation for one direction of the quexistential-focus biconditional, namely the fact that quexistentials are generally contrastively focused on their interrogative use. We argue that this should be seen as a particular instance of an even more general fact, namely that interrogative words (quexistential or not) are always contrastively focused. We propose to account for this fact by generalizing the common view on contrastive focus in a way that incorporates both an external and an internal notion of contrast. The second contribution of the paper concerns the other direction of the quexistential-focus biconditional. We present evidence which, at least at face value, suggests that this part of the generalization is in fact not valid. That is, focus on a quexistential does not necessarily preclude an existential interpretation, at least not in all languages. Specifically, we will show that it is possible for Dutch wat to be interpreted existentially even when it is focused. However, we will attempt an explanation of this phenomenon.In seminal work, Potts 2005 claimed that the behavior of 'supplements'—appositive relative clauses (ARCs) and nominals—offers a powerful argument in favor of a multidimensional semantics, one in which certain expressions fail to interact scopally with various operators because their meaning is located in a new semantic dimension. Focusing on ARCs, with data from English, French and German (Poschmann 2018), we explore an alternative to Potts’s bidimensional account in which (i) appositives may be syntactically attached with matrix scope, despite their appearance in embedded positions (McCawley 1981); (ii) contra McCawley, they may also be syntactically attached within the scope of other operators, in which case they semantically interact with them; (iii) they are semantically conjoined with the rest of the sentence, but (iv) they give rise to nontrivial projection facts when they do not have matrix scope. In effect, our analysis accounts for most of the complexity of these data by positing a more articulated syntax and pragmatics, while eschewing the use of a new dimension of meaning.

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“…This is likely due to the fact that polarity focus invokes two well-defined and complementary alternatives, so picking out one of them necessarily contrasts with the other alternative. This latter assumption also follows a more general line of thought, which views contrastive focus as focus proper and which relegates new/given information marking to a separate mechanism (see Kratzer & Selkirk 2020 and the references therein).…”

Section: Polarity Focusmentioning

confidence: 90%

Verum accent IS VERUM, but not always focus

Bill

Koev

2021

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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This paper studies the occurrence of verum accent in declaratives and polar interrogatives. Verum accent exhibits two kinds of interpretational effect: (i) it requires an epistemic conflict across sentence types and (ii) it may also convey a negative speaker bias in polar interrogatives. We argue that the former effect is due to a presuppositional VERUM operator and that the latter effect arises from the possibility of said operator carrying polarity focus. Our proposal implies that verum accenting and polarity focus are two distinct phenomena that interact in interesting ways.

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Deconstructing information structure

Cited by 22 publications

References 125 publications

The greater the contrast, the greater the potential: On the effects of focus in syntax

The greater the contrast, the greater the potential: On the effects of focus in syntax

Quexistentials and Focus

Verum accent IS VERUM, but not always focus

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